6 Months later: Is the RED worth it? (It’s Complicated)

Published on April 23, 2019

Cinematography & Filmmaking

Camera, filmgear, Red

Hello guys, I hope you had an good weekend with a lot of treats from the Easter bunny. We on the other hand are going to talk about something that wasn’t a treat, working with the RED. You are probably thinking now, “What? I would love to work with a RED, that would be awesome!”. Well don’t get me wrong, a RED camera is super awesome and I love working with it. But I underestimated how different and maybe more difficult it is to work with.

With my experience here at Cinecom, I can say that I’m quite skilled with a DSRL. And in particular the Panasonic GH5, which we used for all our videos in the past. We also developed a good workflow that made us work like a video machine. But then the RED arrived and boy did we make mistakes. We thought we could maintain our same workflow with the RED as with the DSLR’s. Well we learned really quick that we were wrong. And thus the search for a new workflow started, making other mistakes during the way. Eventually we learned that with the RED, you don’t change the camera settings according to the scene. You change the scene according to the RED. And this means you need to pay more attention to the cinematography of the scene and light everything perfectly.

Big thanks to Scott Balkum, one of the RED users I came in touch with. He taught me many new things about the camera and he also shares his experience on Youtube.

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